The king and I

Thomas Becket Warrior, Priest, Rebel, Victim: A 900-Year-Old Story Retold, by John Guy, Viking, RRP£25, 408 pages

On December 29 1170, in the very sanctuary of his cathedral, four men set upon Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury. The assailants, wielding swords, hatchets and axes, were knights of no great nobility or distinction, court bouncers prepared to do anything to secure Henry II’s approval. In a temper tantrum, as was his wont, some days earlier Henry had dropped a dangerous hint. According to John Guy’s suspenseful, meticulously researched biography, the long-accepted version – “Who will rid me of this turbulent priest” – is apocryphal. Among the variety of witness records, this by the chronicler Gervase of Canterbury was probably the authentic outburst: “How many cowardly, useless drones have I nourished that not even a single one is willing to avenge me of the wrongs I have suffered?”

John Guy, author of the acclaimed Tudor England and A Daughter’s Love: Thomas and Margaret More, describes a deep, complicated and symbiotic relationship between Becket and Henry. When Henry was crowned, aged 21, Becket was 34, an accomplished canon lawyer and archdeacon of Canterbury in minor orders. The young king, admiring Becket’s acumen and trustworthiness among so many courtier parasites and intriguers, raised him from obscurity to one of the highest positions in the land – chancellor of England. He approved of Becket’s eventual appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury (he was ordained priest on the same day) as a means of bringing a too-powerful church to heel. When Becket went holy on him, defied him, and attempted to strengthen church privileges, their relationship soured, then turned to hatred.

Without explicit orders, the knights proceeded to implement Henry’s evident devout wish: to be rid of Becket. The fatal blow took off the top of his skull, the sword landing with such force on the stone flags that sparks flew. One of the assassins pressed his foot on Thomas’s neck and, according to an eye-witness, delved “with the point of his sword, scraping out the brains from the hollow of his skull, and smearing them mixed with blood and bone fragments, over the paving stones, and shouting out, ‘This one won’t get up again’”.

That Thomas was seen as a man of great piety as well as the primate of England, slaughtered in defence of the Holy Mother Church, ensured his status as a martyr. Monks scrambled to scoop up the congealing blood and tissue; they marvelled at the hair shirt concealed beneath his robes. It was crawling with lice: a sign of radical asceticism. Within days, people were reporting miracles performed by contact with his relics. The spot on which he died became the most famous and frequently visited shrine in the land. Two years later, Pope Alexander III canonised him. Henry was obliged to do penance at Becket’s tomb to avoid excommunication.

The significance of this 12th-century story is not so much the extreme, sacrilegious violence, but the poker game of church-state tensions that reverberate to this day. Consider the Catholic bishops at odds with Barack Obama, the US president, over state-funded family planning; the Irish government’s intent to jail priests who refuse to inform the police of paedophile penitents (thus being required to break the ancient seal of confession); the Catholic bishops’ opposition to the British government’s intention to countenance gay marriage; the clash between the same government and Rowan Williams, outgoing Archbishop of Canterbury, over public spending cuts.

The nub of the 12th-century dispute has parallels in principle with at least some of these issues, but none so relevant perhaps as the recent ecclesiastical handling of the Catholic clerical abuse scandal. Just as bishops, and indeed the Vatican itself, have reserved, until recently, the right to secrecy according to the provisions of canon law in cases involving paedophile priests, so ecclesiastical courts in Henry’s day argued their precedence over royal courts when miscreants were clerics, even in minor orders. The king wanted it in writing, rather than as an unwritten custom, that a clerical miscreant should have his case registered in a royal court for subsequent judgment after proceedings in an ecclesiastical court were completed. Henry, moreover, was adamant that the monarchy should be consulted before officials close to the crown were excommunicated, even if the interdict came from the Pope in Rome.

Becket, determined to protect ecclesiastical prerogatives, attempted to frustrate Henry’s not unreasonable measures. They clashed. The archbishop was driven into exile, Canterbury’s considerable properties and funds appropriated. Papal legates arbitrated an uneasy peace (but not as history tells us “the kiss of Peace”), allowing Becket to return to England. But the antagonism between king and archbishop flared once more when Henry had his heir, Henry the Younger, crowned by three of Becket’s brother bishops, thus usurping the prerogative of the See of Canterbury to anoint a new king.

Guy’s biography scintillates with energetic scene-setting, giving us wherever possible a tactile, visual feel for early medieval England, and London especially. His portraits of the two men, from the early period of their relationship, are subtle and telling. He does not subscribe to the good-Becket bad-Henry theory of history. Both were guilty of mounting hubris and thirst for power; Becket was warned from the very outset that he was making hostages to fortune. “Henry’s rapport with his chancellor,” Guy writes, “would be built on the latter’s willingness to endure in good spirit the frequent challenges that Henry set for him. Hungry for power and influence, he was still sufficiently malleable.” But, as one of Becket’s early colleagues warned him, one day circumstances may arise in which “you do not wish to abandon your aims or he to derogate anything from the royal dignity”.

Yet Becket’s high moral stand, despite the hair shirt, was not all of a piece. One of the most revealing narratives in this feast of compelling stories is an instance of Becket’s ability to play fast and loose with power and ethics in his early days. On his way up the greasy canonical pole, Roger, the future Archbishop of York, had routinely sodomised a hapless “beautiful boy” in his household. When the victim attempted to expose his paedophile patron, Roger had him blinded, and later hanged on trumped-up charges. The bishop was nevertheless found out. Doing a favour for Theobold, then Archbishop of Canterbury, Becket got Roger off the hook with some fancy clerical-legal footwork.

Guy’s account of this titanic struggle between two great egoists of English history breathes new life into an oft-told tale of throne and altar antagonism, with its complex undercurrents of money, politics, religion and shocking violence. However well you think you know the story, it is well worth the read.

John Cornwell is author of ‘Newman’s Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint’ (Continuum)